Comment

Welcome! Tons of new subscribers this week thanks to Lisa Dziuba and her post about which iOS newsletters you should subscribe to. Check it out if you missed it last week. Remember, if you have any feedback or links you want me to know about, just reply to this email. I read and respond to every one. On to the links!

Side note: I've been working on localization with one of my apps and will have more info on what I've learned soon. Stay tuned!

News

This week, Apple introduced a new option when promoting apps with search ads. The new "Search Ads Basic" allows devs to pay only when a user installs their app. Though this option doesn't have all the features of advanced search ads, a predictable cost is something that all developers can be excited about. Hopefully, we will get an ad credit from Apple in our email box soon!

App Success

Launching an app is a step-by-step process. You can't skip steps or half-ass anything if you want a chance at success. Just because you have a bad launch doesn't mean your app can't recover, but it certainly doesn't help. Josiah has had some successful app launches and shares his knowledge including how to plan the launch, incentives to download, what performance metrics you should be looking at, and what mistakes to avoid.

Sponsored

No sponsors this week, so you get a Patreon update. 😁 I've added a few supporters in 2017 and am now up to $38 a month in support. That's amazing and I give much thanks to all supporters. I hope you have been enjoying the extra links. I have already sent out over 200 extra links to supporters this year.

I currently have 12 supporters. I send them an extra newsletter with the links that missed this week's Indie iOS Focus Weekly each week. The links are a perk you get for just pledging $1 a month! There are also pledges that will give you some exposure in the newsletter. You can check out the other perks here. Thanks for considering! - chris

Jobs

Care.com is the largest and fastest-growing technology platform for online care services, helping families, businesses, and corporate employees find high-quality care for their kids, pets, parents, and homes.

Revenue

Jacob points out a fundamental flaw in StoreKit that has been there since it's release with iOS 3.0. StoreKit returns nothing for you to track your payment. If you thought the StoreKit third-party library you were using fixes this, Jacob argues they don't fix the problem at all. Interesting look at what Apple needs to do to remedy the problem.

For a good user experience, your app needs to react correctly to purchases that it initiates, but you can’t.

Career

Sam has been highlighting some great developers with his series of dev chats. You'll find developers of all varieties and situations including several notable iOS devs. It's interesting to look through each developers story to find out how they ended up where they are and what they learned along the way.

Beginners

More Swift optional reading for you. In learning Swift, optionals were probably the biggest thing for me to get my head around because you deal with optionals all the time and warning-free Xcode builds doesn't necessarily mean you have it right. If you are new to Swift or still don't have a firm grasp on optionals, check out this post from Monica Granbois.